“Anne’s first glimpse of slaves had been on their arrival, walking from the quay as a group ‘returned from 7 or 8 miles distance, loaded each with two bundles of sticks slung across his bare shoulder’.

‘It made one sigh at first. The only comfort in looking at the weight of the bundles was that one of them only was for the master, the other was for the private benefit of the slave.’

“Of all Lady Anne Barnard’s accomplishments – as poet, hostess, traveller, artist and chronicler – her compassion in embracing the child of a husband’s infidelity was the least renowned. As her final act of defiance, it was also the most enduring.”

“So the book is not ‘anti-religion.’ It is against the use of religion as a front for tyranny; which is a different thing altogether.” “… and many have ruled behind a religious front. It makes the creation of heretics that much easier.”

“And many Dear Readers will become writers in their turn. That is how we writers all started: by reading. We heard the voice of a book speaking to us.”

“Had Iris really found that light, that sense of inner peace?” “And it seems that at some point disillusion set in… Towards the very end of her life, hoping that faith would help her through to death, which she feared, Iris felt religion to be as little comfort as anything else.”

“Like myself, Bob is an exhibitionist and would sell his grandmother if the transaction would make a good story. Or rather, he wouldn’t bother to sell her; he would merely say he had done it and make a better story than the truth out of the old lady.”

“If it (footbinding) had been regarded only as a symbol of the suppression of women, mothers would not have been so enthusiastic in binding the feet of their young daughters. Actually footbinding was sexual in its nature throughout. Its origin was undoubtedly in the courts of licentious kings, its popularity with men based on the worship of women’s feet and shoes as a love fetish…"